to be admired. ‘This is Chief Inspector Gently down here about the body on the beach… don’t be afraid of him, my dear, there’s no need to be shy.’
Deanna wasn’t shy. She beamed at Gently with a mechanical smile which had haunting overtones of Mrs Watts in it, then seated herself next to him. She had a cat-like grace too studied to be pleasing. She was twenty- one or — two.
‘My daughter’s on the stage, Inspector,’ chattered Mrs Watts, sploshing tea into straight-sided cups with lustred rims, ‘she was in the pantomime last season… just in the chorus, you know.’
‘I understudied the principal boy,’ beamed Deanna.
‘They’re going to give her something bigger this year… of course, she’s home with me during the summer.’
Gently accepted one of the straight-sided cups and stirred it with a spoon that had a knob of black plastic to its spindly shank. ‘Getting back to your lodger…’ he murmured.
‘Of course, Inspector.’ Mrs Watts handed a cup of tea to Dutt behind the television. ‘Deanna dear, you saw him go out on Tuesday… the inspector wants to know if he had his case with him.’
‘I don’t really remember, Ma… I didn’t know it was going to be important.’
‘But it is important, dear… you must try to think.’
‘I am trying, Ma, but it isn’t any good.’
‘What time was it when he went out?’ asked Gently.
Deanna curled round in her seat to him. ‘I just can’t remember, Inspector… isn’t it awful of me?’
‘What were you doing when you saw him?’
‘Oh… I was going up to my room to get ready for the Tuesday dance at the Wellesley.’
‘How long would that have taken you?’
‘About an hour… aren’t I terrible!’
‘And then your boyfriend called for you?’
‘Well yes, he did, Inspector!’
‘And what time was that?’
‘It was a quarter past eight… he was late.’
‘Thank you, Miss Deanna.’
In his veneered throne Copping stirred restlessly. ‘How about the visitor’s book — what did he put in there?’ he asked.
Mrs Watts’s chin took on an ominous tilt. ‘He didn’t put anything in there. They don’t, most of them, until they’re going.’
‘They should,’ said Copping stoutly, ‘they should make an entry as soon as they arrive.’
‘Well, they don’t, Mr Nosey, and that’s all there is to it. And if you’re going to make trouble out of it you’ll have to make trouble for everybody in Starmouth who lets rooms…’
Gently made a pacifying gesture. ‘But surely he gave a name, Mrs Watts? Naturally, you would ask for that…’
‘Of course I did, Inspector. And he gave it to me without any hanky-panky — only it was such a peculiar one that I couldn’t even say it after him. So he just laughed in that rather nice way he had and told me to call him Max… and that’s what we all called him.’
‘Didn’t you inquire his nationality?’
‘He said he was an American but if he was, he hadn’t been one for long, not with that accent.’
Gently sipped some tea and looked round for somewhere to put his cup. ‘How long was he going to stay?’ he asked.
‘Just on to the end of this week — I hadn’t any room for him after that. I’m usually full up right through, of course, but it just so happened through an illness…’
‘Quite so, Mrs Watts. And did he pay up till the end of the week?’
‘He did — it’s one of the rules of this establishment.’
‘There seemed to be no shortage of money with him?’
‘Not him, Inspector. He’d got a whole wad of notes in his wallet — fivers, most of them.’
‘Did he ask any questions before he took the room?’
‘Well, the usual ones… how much it would be, if we’d got a separate bathroom and the like.’
‘Did he ask about the other guests, for instance?’
‘Yes, he did, now you come to mention it. He asked if they were all English and if they had all arrived the Saturday before.’
‘And did that suggest anything to you?’
‘He seemed a bit anxious about it… I thought he might be expecting to run into somebody he knew.’
‘Somebody pleasant or somebody unpleasant?’
‘Unpleasant, I suppose… if he really is the one you picked up on the beach.’
‘Did he suggest that from the way he spoke?’
‘Well no, Inspector, he didn’t actually…’
Gently prized up a peppermint cream from the dwindling stock in his pocket. It induced that faraway look in his eye which Mrs Watts mistook for profound cerebration, but which in reality was connected with his solvency in terms of that important commodity… though Starmouth was pretty good peppermint cream country at most hours of the day and night.
‘Was he a good mixer?’ he asked absently.
‘Oh, he got on with everyone, though I wouldn’t say he made friends. But he got on with them. They all liked our Max.’
‘Was he regular in his habits?’ Gently yielded up his cup for a second fill from the hotel-plate teapot.
‘I dare say he was… as people go when they’re on holiday.’
‘Tidy… a good lodger?’
‘Oh yes… most of the time.’ A frown hovered over the steely eyes as she handed Gently the freshly-filled cup. ‘He left his room in a bit of a mess when he went out that last time, but probably he was in a hurry… you haven’t always time to clear up after you.’
‘A mess…!’ Gently hesitated in the act of plying his plastic-knobbed spoon. ‘What sort of a mess?’
‘Well, if you ask me, Inspector, he’d lost something and was trying to find it quickly, that’s what it looked like. The wardrobe was open, the drawers pulled out of the dressing-table — right out, some of them — and if he hadn’t up-ended his suitcase on to the floor then he’d given a good imitation of it. And the bed, too, I should say he’d had that apart, not to mention turning up a corner of the carpet. It was a proper mess, you can take it from me!’
Gently drew a long breath. ‘But of course,’ he said expressionlessly, ‘of course you cleared it all up again, Mrs Watts?’
‘I did, Inspector,’ the regal matron assured him, ‘I can’t stand untidiness in my house, no matter from whom.’
‘Ahh!’ sighed Gently, ‘I needn’t have asked that one, need I…?’
The room faced back with a solitary and not-very-large sash window overlooking a small backyard. It was a typical lodging-house ‘single’, about eight by ten, not much more than a cupboard in which had to be packed the bed, wardrobe, dressing-table, chair and the tiny fitted wash-basin which tried to substantiate the terms Mrs Watts charged for such accommodation. The walls were papered in an irritable grained brown friezed with orange and green, the floor had a strip of carpet which echoed these colours. The bed and other furniture were of flimsy stained wood, late thirties in vintage, and the light-shade was a contraption of orange-sprayed glass with a golden tassel for the flies to perch on. In essence it bore a generic resemblance to the parlour downstairs, thought Gently. There was the same over-crowding and full-bodied vulgarity. It was only the cash index that varied so considerably.
Beside the bed stood an expensive looking suitcase, a rather jazzy affair styled in some sort of plastic with towelling stripes. Copping bent down to pick it up, but Gently laid a sudden hand on his arm. ‘Watch it… I want this place printed,’ he said.
‘Printed?’ Copping stared in surprise. ‘There can’t be much left to print after all this clearing-up…’
Gently shrugged. ‘If there is, I want it.’
‘But what does it matter — we’ve got three witnesses at least to identify him?’
